By Sara Finegan 

         My colleague, Laurie Vierra, is a Special Education Intern this year with a special day class of third and fourth graders, having taken advantage of our district’s offer to pay for general education teachers to move into and obtain a Masters in Special Ed.  

         A background in the general education standards, pacing, and instructional methods are great assets in the special ed classroom.  Laurie knows what her students need to be able to do in order to function at grade level, and she’s interested in lifting them up to that level.  She has no sense of comfort with student dependence or any belief that a learning deficit is a static thing that can never be repaired. 

         She certainly isn’t under the impression that a learning disability prevents anyone from doing grade-level work.

         This was, at first, a little bit disconcerting to the students in her class and some of their parents, who are used to the program of the teacher she is replacing: 

• Gone are the days when the teacher and the teacher aide (para-educator) will go into student backpacks to retrieve homework:  she will not accept assignments turned in by anyone other than the student.   
• Nowhere in her classroom does the aide sit with students and follow a written script for instruction and support. 
• Students don’t get candy for behaving or finishing their work.   
• Students in Laurie’s class have homework every day, including weekends.  And parents can’t do it for their kids.
• Kids have to get their own pencils and paper; the aide is no longer running across the room to bring the students supplies.
• The work the kids do at home and in class is meaningful; there’s no such thing as “sponge work,” and every lesson and assignment is directed toward a reachable educational goal.  

         I’m interested to see what will happen as the year progresses, and Laurie alters her students’ IEP goals to better reflect state standards.   Almost all of the kids in her class had identical goals during the past couple of years, regardless of what their needs and strengths were.  

         I have a feeling that Laurie is already redesigning and reworking the expectations for each child; I know for a fact that she’s got a clear idea of what each child needs to learn in order to reach higher objectives.  If I know Laurie, she will be custom-creating goals that will actually move her students toward grade-level work.

         That class is moving, kicking and screaming perhaps at first, but more and more confidently into demanding, high-quality work.  I’m delighted, because it means that when the kids come my room for fifth and sixth grade, I won’t spend a year working to develop independent learners.

It was not always this way… 

         A few years ago, I opened my classroom to five new fourth graders, three of whom were GATE (gifted and talented) certified and all of whom, the teacher told me, were proficient in math, reading, and writing. 

         They’d scored high on the state’s standardized tests the previous spring and were just wonderful kids.  She advised that they should all be mainstreamed for math, and that four of them could attend a general education social studies or science class. 

She was right that they were wonderful kids.  I adore them.  But they were not wonderful students, not yet.

• During the first week, one of them spent six hours in the classroom crying because she wanted the lower-grades special day class (SDC) aide to come and sit with her. 
• During the first week, all of them failed the beginning of the year math inventory which reflected what they had learned the previous year.  Only one of them demonstrated anything close to mastery of some of the math modules for the previous year.
• During the first month, I discovered that they had no idea how to talk or think about what they were reading:  their idea of reading comprehension was to parrot back what the text said. 
• When I administered an On-Demand writing assessment that asked them to describe their favorite experience the previous summer, none of them wrote more than three sentences. 
• Three of them lasted less than two weeks in a general education math class because they weren’t able to follow the lessons.   
• None of them were able to participate in science or social studies, because they couldn’t get accustomed to the concept of active, engaged learning.  They sat passively through instruction, and waited during independent work time for someone to tell them what to do instead of reading the directions.
• I discovered on their first benchmark test that they were used to having all assessments read to them, even though four of them read at the third grade level or higher.  When they did in-class assignments, they expected me or our aide to sit with them and tell them what to do next.

The children were shorthchanged…

         Their previous teacher did them a grave disservice.  She sent me five very intelligent kids who hadn’t a clue how to learn.  It wasn’t their fault; they’d never been taught how to think or had thinking skills modeled for them. 

         My former colleague never worked in general education, never entered a general education classroom, and felt safe only in her cocooned Special Day Classroom, where she could nurture her students and coddle them.

         Laurie’s work is already showing results, and it’s just the beginning of November.  She’s participating in a fourth-grade team with two other general education teachers:  she took on social studies, and has a reverse-mainstreaming thing going on in her classroom; she teaches a rigorous math class to her students and some of the lower-scoring kids in general ed (and three of my students, fifth and sixth graders who are still needing support with basic math skills in a very small group situation). 

         When you walk into her classroom, it’s student work you see, not artwork done by her or her aide. 

         Laurie and I can finish each others’ sentences when we discuss rigor and independent learning.  This shorthand is based on a mutual understanding of what special education is:  a service designed to bridge the gap between ability and capacity, not an educational system to protect kids with special needs.

         When we smother kids with support and don’t teach them how to think for themselves, even the brightest of them will atrophy as learners.

demanding classroom · GATE · high expectations · homework · IEP goals · learning disabled · para-educator · reverse mainstreaming · rigor · rigorous instruction · special day class · special education · standards

 By Sara Finegan

          By far the most common deficits we see in the special ed classroom are problems with reading.  The vast majority of our students do not read close to grade level, and this impairs their ability to make progress in the general education curriculum independently. 

           Reading skills have very little to do with intelligence and everything to do with the way the brain perceives the task.  I have had more than one student classified as GATE (Gifted and Talented)  in the fifth or sixth grade, who reads at the first grade level. 

          The problem with reading deficits is not only how they pervade all aspects of the curriculum but that they discourage most kids from doing the work that will improve the skills:  reading.    Most of the kids who don’t read well also don’t read.  At least, not until they get to a demanding classroom.

          And why should they?  It’s exhausting, halting, stuttering, discouraging, boring, and one never ceases to be reminded that one doesn’t do it well. 

          There are a gazillion programs out there which purport to (and often do!) improve students’ ability to read.  There are books and books, articles and more articles about interventions and strategies that work.   I particularly enjoy attending workshops and other professional development opportunities dealing with reading instruction.  I collect as much information and as many ideas as I can, and use them in a myriad of ways to support reading in the classroom. 

Types of reading skill

          Reading skills can be boiled to several types, and it’s important that we address all of them, with rigor, in the demanding classroom.  They are as follows:

1.   Decoding 

         Obviously, phonemic awareness and the understanding of the sounds the letters make and how they become words is important.  Our students need to be aware of the long and short vowel sounds, blends, and other aspects of the decoding process.  It’s the cornerstone of the mechanics of reading, after all.   

           Or is it?  I’m not so sure.  Certainly, it’s an important skill to have.  But how often do good readers decode words, really?  I paid attention to my own reading for a week, and I only decoded once – and it was a latin word.  What I mostly did was…

             …recognize words.  Which brings me to the next type of reading mechanics:

2.   Sight words.

         Turns out that in my reading, I mostly scan over the text and recognize each of the words.  I don’t sound them out, even the big words, because I know them already as soon as I see them.  Most people I know who are good readers do the same thing. 

          It also turns out that our students, the ones with profound reading deficits, don’t recognize most words.  Sometimes it’s because of visual processing slowness, or because of visual memory issues.  Sometimes it’s because they don’t see a lot of words very often.  After all, if you  never read, dreaded reading, you wouldn’t know many words. 

         Whatever the reason for a low bank of sight words in ones brain, this must be addressed, intensively, consistently, and with the student involved in setting measurable goals. 

           This year, each of my 5th and 6th grade students has decided that they want to increase their sight word vocabulary by 15 words a week, which translates to about 60 words per month, or 600 for the whole school year. 

           I get to pick the words.  And I don’t pick easy ones – the one-syllable, simple words that occur most frequently will be picked up automatically as we increase our reading stamina and practice fluency.  I pick the two and three-syllable words that trip kids up.  I’ll post October’s list somewhere in here, I promise. 

           Every child gets sight words flashcards to carry around from home to school and back, and they are assiduous in practicing with each other daily while I’m taking roll or collecting papers.  They got their parents involved by asking them to sign a “reading helper” contract – so now, parents or siblings work with them at home.  This is not as easy as it sounds:  some of my students come from families where English is not spoken in the home or where the parents aren’t literate.  This is where older and younger siblings, cousins, and neighbors help out.  Somehow or another, every one of my students mastered 80 words between September 8 and October 1.  EIGHTY!  

          Confidence increases exponentially when kids can recognize words, especially the hard words that always made them stumble, crash and burn in previous reading projects.  You can bet that the kids are more eager to read independently now.

3.   Reading fluency.

          Fluency is the ability to read quickly and smoothly, with inflection, not stumbling over too many words (we all do when we read out loud, at least occasionally), infusing drama into the voice. 

          Most kids with reading deficits don’t have the voice in their heads telling them the story as they read.  They read like robots, one word at a time, staccato.  There’s no feeling, no expression, and certainly not a lot of attention to what’s going on in the text – the kids are too busy just dealing with the mechanics of reading.

         Until and unless we work with them on reading fluency, they aren’t going to hear that voice in their heads (the healthy kind!).  They aren’t going to enjoy reading, and they aren’t going to have the strength and stamina to figure out much of what is going on in the story.

         My favorite reading fluency program is Read Naturally, which I think has been around forever, or at least a long time.  And no, I don’t get paid to write about it.  Read Naturally is a series of stories on tape and on paper, which kids listen to and read out loud over and over and over again, practicing speed and inflection.  There’s a timed component to it that many teachers use to help kids build their speed of reading, but I never have managed to do much with it, and I don’t actually use the tapes very much either.  It’s the one-page human interest stories that  we focus on.

          Read Naturally text goes from primer to the higher-grade levels of reading, moving up by half-grade levels.   The stories start out with a larger font, shorter text, and move into smaller font, more complex sentences, and longer paragraphs gradually through the levels.  It seems to progress at just the right measure for kids.

          This year, my kids all set a fluency goal as well, which is related to their ability to decode and recognize words, of course.  They aimed high – they all want to be reading at grade level by the end of the year.  This is certainly doable if we are talking about decoding and fluency –if the kids do the work consistently. 

          So far, they’re all on track with their goals to increase by a half-grade level in fluency every six weeks.  I  have advised them that the higher the level, the more difficult each text will be to practice and master fluently, and that we may need to tweak how often we work at it – but I have not said anything about adjusting their goals or expectations.

           This is the first year we have all tackled fluency with such rigor, and it’s because last year, one of my students jumped from a first grade reading level to the fifth grade in a matter of months by using Read Naturally every day at home and school.  This inspired his friends, and now they’re all gung-ho.  They eagerly ask to read to me every morning, and are mastering between two and three stories per week so far.    The amount of work they are putting in at school and at home means they are increasing something else, which leads me to the fourth leg on the stool we call reading technique…

 4.   Reading stamina.

         Reading stamina is the ability to read for long periods of time with focus and purpose.  Avid readers like me can read all day, even taking our books to the bathroom or holding them while we cook dinner.  Students with reading deficits are often lucky to be able to read for five minutes at a time.  Last year, my student David, who has both ADHD and autism, lasted 11 SECONDS at a time with text at the primer level.  I still dream about that.

          I have not, I confess, spent a lot of time working on stamina as an isolated skill.  I get caught up in some of the more engaging aspects of reading instruction – and by that I mean activities in which I get to engage with my students.  Stamina is something that one develops solo.  And I find that it increases exponentially as students develop the technical and cognitive skills to read and understand. 

          These days, David reads for about 12 minutes at a time.   With a third grade text.  He will be moving up to level 3.5 next week.

Turn that rickety stool into an armchair.

          Reading is a skill that we all rely on in life.  For some, it’s an unwieldy and rickety stool that’s missing a leg and whose seat comes unscrewed every few days.  For others, it’s a cushy, comfy armchair in whose depths we can sink and disappear into worlds and characters without limit.  The one thing we all have in common is that we need something to rest our butts on, and legs to hold us up. 

         In a demanding classroom, reading instruction is precisely-customized to individual student needs, and most of the time is devoted to practicing.  In a demanding classroom, students participate in setting goals and measuring progress.

decoding · demanding classroom · fluency · GATE · high expectations · learning disabled · phonemic awareness · Read Naturally · reading deficits · reading mechanics · reading stamina · rigor · rigorous instruction · Sara Finegan · sight words · special education · standards · vocabulary